Back home in Da Region

This wasn't exactly on the menu where I grew up," says Yvette Marie Dostatni, eagerly taking another sip of soup. "But it is great. I'll tell you, lobster bisque rocks."

Dostatni was born 29 years ago in Blue Island but grew up in Northwest Indiana, mostly in Highland and Munster.

Her father worked in the steel mills and her mother was a hospital receptionist. Hers was not a well-to-do family, but Dostatni is filled with wonderful and substantial memories of the area that shaped her.

"It was and is called 'Da Region,' " she says.

And in almost every way it is a place that has stayed with her, influencing her life and her art.

Dostatni is a photographer, one drawn not to fashion or fluff but, as she simply puts it, "to real people doing real things."

"I got my first camera when I was 7. It was a gift from my older brother who won it for selling the most Christmas stamps for Our Lady of Grace Church," she says.

She took photos of family and friends, neighborhoods and trees. A high school photography class further fueled her passion and after graduation she was determined to make it her career.

"But the only way to support my habit was to get someone else to pay for it," she says.

From the window of her bedroom, she could see the offices of the Times of Northwest Indiana. She strolled over, applied for a job and started as a freelancer before getting hired full time.

After a couple of years at the paper, juggling work and college courses, Dostatni took off for England, where she spent time with a group of environmental protesters. She returned to the states and followed other environmentalists in California and Idaho. In 1997, she came home.

"I noticed a lot of changes," she says. "This was an area that for decades was dominated by the steel business, but that all changed. Businesses were closed and there were malls where fields once stood. The one thing that remained was the people. These are blue-collar people who know tough times. These people are survivors."

So she began to photograph them and some of the results, shot mostly in 1999, grace these pages. None were easy to capture on film, for these are not people accustomed to posing for photographs.

"A lot of them were kind of suspicious," says Dostatni. "But once they learned I was from Da Region, things went OK. Some didn't want me to use their names, but they allowed me into their lives because we spoke the same language."

Now a resident of Wicker Park, Dostatni spent a year as one of eight staff photographers for the CITY 2000 project and is a frequent contributor to the Tribune, the Chicago Reader and Chicago magazine. Her artistic philosophy can be summarized like this: "I always want people to see what I see." But people bring their own ideas, attitudes and prejudices to any encounter, often distorting or ignoring the intentions of the artist. As a result there may be some who see these photos, these people, as oddities.

"These people are not odd or anything like that," says Dostatni. "These are the people I grew up with. These people are my idols."

Her photos treat them with respect, I believe, but they are all shadowed by a timeless quality that gives them a certain sadness. They might have been taken decades ago, when Dostatni was a child.

"They are," she says, "portraits of an Indiana that is quickly vanishing."